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John Robertson is known as an expert on the Enlightenment. He was born in Scotland in 1951 and obtained his Ph. D. under the supervision of Hugh Trevor-Roper. His doctoral thesis was titled, "The improving citizens: Militia debates and political thought in the Scottish Enlightenment." The standing army controversy was a key event forming the Scottish intellectual landscape in the eighteenth century. In 1975, Robertson became a research lecturer at Oxford University. After Oxford, he became a professor at the Faculty of History, University of Cambridge. His post was after Quentin Skinner, whose contextualist approach of intellectual history is influential.

Robertson researched the standing army controversy as well as the origin and formation of the Enlightenment. In his book titled, The Case for the Enlightenment: Scotland and Naples, 1680-1760 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), he compared how the Enlightenment in Scotland had similarities or shared an intellectual heritage and mission with the Enlightenment in Naples. In Scotland as well as in Naples, intellectuals furthered the process of the Enlightenment. Both countries also shared a similar intellectual background, including classical reading and seventeenth-century philosophy.

Based on these detailed studies, Robertson published The Enlightenment: A Very Short Introduction. Based on up-to-date secondary literature, this book elucidated what the Enlightenment was. Robertson refuted some secondary literature that saw the Enlightenment as leading to the problems of modern society. For some scholars, the Enlightenment was notorious in causing the negative aspects of modernity. Robertson however, insisted on the importance of the Enlightenment, and its historical value.

On the one hand, Robertson focused on religion. Earlier, scholars such as Peter Gay saw the Enlightenment as secular, arguing that the Enlightenment thinkers were opposed to any religious view of the world. However, recent studies have clarified this picture as erroneous. Before the Enlightenment movement, Biblical studies suggested that the narratives in the Bible could not be historically accurate. Based on these studies, some authors thought that the historical narratives of the Bible were written by various authors in different times, and that this difference had not been pointed out before. These studies inspired the Enlightenment thinkers to reconsider the religious narratives of the Bible as well as religion.

On the other hand, Robertson emphasized the importance of the formation of political economy during the Enlightenment. When Enlightenment thinkers such as Adam Smith formed his theory of political economy, he had people's conditions in mind. The Enlightenment thinkers paid attention to how people lived and tried to discover how people could improve their conditions. Bettering their conditions was the key to understanding the focus of the Enlightenment thinkers. When considering this topic, Robertson succeeded in his former book The Case for the Enlightenment, which saw the formation of the political economy as the core of the program of the Enlightenment.

 

(Written by NOHARA Shinji, Associate Professor, Graduate School of Economics / 2019)